SOMERVILLE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/API?src=hash” target=”_blank”gt;#APIlt;/agt;–SmartBear,
the innovator behind the industry’s highest impact tools to build, test,
and monitor great software, released the State
of API 2019 Report uncovering API standardization as the top
challenge facing API teams as they support the continued growth of
microservices. The survey prompted more than 3,000 responses from a
global audience of API developers, architects, testers, and product
leaders.

APIs play a critical role in the world of software development —
powering both consumer-facing applications and the internal processes
that keep modern businesses running efficiently. The
State of API Report covers different stages of the API lifecycle,
including API design, development, documentation, testing, and
monitoring. Additionally, there are insights into the technologies,
standards, and tooling that are reshaping the API ecosystem.

Key findings:

76 percent of organizations are developing both internal and
public-facing APIs

Microservice architecture is the preferred method to enable the
continuous delivery and deployment of large, complex applications. It
also empowers organizations to evolve their technology stack discreetly,
scaling and becoming more resilient as needs and requirements change.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents believe that adoption of
microservice architecture will drive the biggest growth in API adoption
in the next two years.

“Constructing microservices from an API-first foundation is a solid
strategy, and so an increase in microservices architecture styles will
only create a proliferation of APIs,” said Bill
Doerrfeld, Editor-in-Chief, Nordic
APIs. “Microservices may also be affecting design choices; for
example, we’re seeing GraphQL emerge as an API gateway for
microservices.”

With the continued emergence of microservices, organizations can be
maintaining hundreds if not thousands of different APIs within their
service architecture, and the need to establish standards for how these
services communicate becomes clear. Further, 58 percent of respondents
report standardization to be their top API development challenge – and
one that has fueled a 175 percent increase in adoption of the OAS
as part of the development process.

As the leader in OAS API development and the company behind the popular Swagger
tools, SmartBear has rolled out a series of enhancements in the SwaggerHub
platform to help teams scale their API development with the OAS. With
support for internal style rules across both OAS 2.0 and OAS 3.0,
organizations can enforce common standards and rules across all internal
and external-facing APIs from a single centralized dashboard.

“SwaggerHub has allowed us to scale our growing API and provide our
users with a way to test their API calls,” said Matthew
Buttler, Documentation Prime, Signiant,
Inc. “SwaggerHub also allows our customers and developers to view
previous versions of our API resources on the fly. This lets customers
adapt to changes in our spec.”

About SmartBear SoftwareSmartBear is behind the software
that empowers developers, testers, and operations engineers at over
20,000 of the world’s most innovative organizations including Adobe,
JetBlue, MasterCard, and Microsoft. More than 6 million people use our
tools to build, test, and monitor great software, faster. Our
high-impact tools are easy to try, easy to buy, and easy to use. These
tools are backed by a team of people passionate about helping you create
software that transforms our world. Those tools are SmartBear tools.
That team is SmartBear. For more information, visit: http://smartbear.com,
or follow us on LinkedIn,Twitter
or Facebook.